The kid on the screen can’t be more than 2. He’s standing on a patch of lawn, examining a few dark mounds that some animal has dropped on the grass. As he leans in for a closer look, he begins to lose his balance. The image freezes, and Tom Bergeron, the puckish host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, puts his finger on the TV monitor. “I see a forehead-to-shit ratio right there,” Bergeron says, tracing the kid’s likely downward trajectory.

It’s a late fall afternoon and we’re on the show’s cold and spangled Los Angeles set, a glowing cavern filled with lava-colored video walls and spectral white stars. Bergeron, dressed in a black suit, is rehearsing a bit called “Hit, Miss, or Disgusting?” in which two audience members will be asked to predict the clip’s outcome: Will the kid fall headfirst into the minefield? Or will he swerve away at the last second?

Since this is America’s Funniest Home Videos—a show that for more than 20 years has served as a highlight reel of our lowest moments—the answer is pretty obvious. You don’t get on national TV by dodging poop, and sure enough, when the video resumes, the kid goes down, right on target. “That’s the first face-plant into feces we’ve ever had,” Bergeron says with mock pride. He takes a sip of coffee before moving on to the next clip, in which a little girl gets clocked by a tire swing.

In less than an hour, 200 audience members will arrive at the studio, dressed neatly but not too stuffily, like congregants at an easygoing megachurch. And from the moment they sit down, they will laugh—deep laughs, the kind that make shoulders pump like pistons. They’ll laugh at a baby with its thumb stuck in a toilet lid, a bowler with his thumb stuck in a ball, and a dog with its tongue stuck in a guy’s nose.

Unless you happen to spend a lot of time around little kids or the elderly, it has probably been years since you’ve seen America’s Funniest Home Videos (or AFV, as it has now become known). This is understandable, given that technically speaking it’s the uncoolest show on TV, a saccharine medley of “did I do that?” moppets, frazzled pets, and homegroan puns, all strung together by a lite-ska musical theme. Even by network TV standards, AFV is radically square.

But as dorky as it is, AFV may be one of the most subtly influential shows of the past two decades. Need proof? Just check your Facebook feed. Chances are pretty good that in the past few weeks somebody posted a video that was short, serendipitous, and brazenly stupid—a cocky skateboarder wiping out on a rail, perhaps, or a cat facing down a metronome. Millions of such quick-blip distractions now rove the web, and for that we have AFV to thank and/or blame.

The tens of thousands of clips in AFV‘s video vault are broken down into 12 categories of humor, from adults and animals to fall-downs and weddings. Many of these clips have never been seen by the public—giving the show its secret weapon against the web.

When the show debuted in 1989, in the midst of the camcorder boom, it introduced a whole new accidental-auteur style, marked by wobbly camerawork and abrupt denouements. Because AFV consisted entirely of audience submissions—making the show an early adopter of crowdsourced humor—it instilled the then-revelatory notion that anyone’s follies could be a hit TV gag. The fat guy falling into a pool, the dude wiping out after a botched karate-chop—those could have been your neighbors. Over time a formula emerged: a few seconds of setup, a moment of physical calamity (usually accidental), and a quick shot that showed everything was fine and no one got hurt.

Now AFV‘s DNA can be found everywhere: the “Forever” wedding, “Charlie Bit My Finger,” the 3.8 million cat videos on YouTube—all build on the goofy physicality and to-the-point punch line timing established by AFV. In fact, watching an episode of AFV now feels a lot like watching the web.

For those who can be open-minded about its brainlessness, AFV is still consistently, almost soothingly, hilarious. It’s wall-to-wall primal comedy, from trampoline falls to groin-kicks to old people getting hit by kites. And while the show’s format has undergone a few tweaks over the years, its fundamental MO remains largely unchanged: Each week, a slew of carefully vetted clips are edited together as zippily as possible, with a cash prize—now as high as $100,000—going to the audience favorite. This is probably why, even though it long ago disappeared from pop-culture radar, AFV remains wildly successful. The show is about to wrap its 21st season—more than ER or Law & Order and only one behind The Simpsons, that other ever-durable chronicle of hapless suburbia. It averages more than 7 million viewers a week and celebs from Tina Fey to Muhammad Ali have approached Bergeron to profess their fandom. And because the show is relatively cheap to produce, ABC will likely keep it on the air until the Rapture—unless, of course, somebody gets filmed knocking their head on a stoplight on the way up, requiring a post-event special. “In my house,” Bergeron says, “we call this show ‘the annuity.'”

But here’s the irony: The AFV format has proved so enduring, it has spawned a slew of aggressive competitors. There are now sites like FAIL Blog and the Daily What, as well as TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Tosh.0,scouring the web for hits. And many of them can get videos on the air much quicker than the once-a-week AFV can. When that happens, it’s the showbiz equivalent of a football to the crotch. “I stomp my foot when I see a funny video that’s not mine,” says Vin Di Bona, the show’s creator, who still serves as director and executive producer.

But Di Bona has a secret weapon: an archive of tens of thousands of videos, many of which have never been seen by the public. He’ll need them, too. Because after having the stupid-video landscape almost to itself for years, America’s Funniest Home Videos now must compete with … America’s Funniest Home Videos.

For a show whose ascent was fueled in part by the popularity of consumer electronics and adorable animals, it’s no surprise that AFV originated in Japan. In the late ’80s, producer Di Bona—who helped pioneer the reality genre with Battle of the Network Stars—was having some success translating Japanese TV into shows for American audiences. He had recently seen Japan’s Fun TV With Kato-chan and Ken-chan, a variety show with sketches, music, and a handful of stupid-human videos. Now he had to find a way to adapt it to the US market.

The problem: “Variety was dead,” says Di Bona, a neatly attired 67-year-old with a tranquil voice and thick gray hair. “I said, ‘Let’s just make our version all clips.'” He sold a pilot to ABC and solicited amateur videos via magazine ads and TV appearances. The first America’s Funniest Home Videos special aired November 26, 1989, hosted by comedian Bob Saget. More than 32 million people watched, and ABC rushed it into production as a series.

llustration: Demetri Martin

In its first couple of years, AFV averaged 2,000 submissions per day. Some of the tapes were long and pointless. Nobody really knew what a “home video” was supposed to look like. The show’s very first prizewinner featured a woman with her head stuck in a dishwasher, her husband teasing her from behind the camera. It clocks in at more than a minute and was divided into two segments—the Doctor Zhivago of silly videos. “In the earlier years,” coexecutive producer Michele Nasraway says, “we’d get clips that were more story-oriented. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Over time, the videos got shorter and AFV homed in on what its viewers wanted to see: babies sneezing out birthday candles, little kids bonking each other with turkey legs, and dogs piddling on the sidewalk while balancing on their front legs. Viewers continued to inundate the show with tapes, lured not only by the cash prizes but also its promise of moderately bragworthy TV fame. As part of the deal, every submitter agreed to sign over the video rights to Di Bona, who could license the footage for ads or overseas TV shows, even if the clip never wound up on AFV.

Throughout the early ’90s, the show had a lock on the dumb-video trade. But by the 2000s, the web was allowing users to share clips directly, and the sort of whip-fast videos that had once been the province of AFV were being emailed around the world. In fact, one of the first viral videos, in which a chimp scratches its butt, sniffs its finger, then falls out of a tree—the Birth of a Nation for the QuickTime generation—was a clip that Saget had lobbied for years to get on AFV.

The rise of rampant video sharing hasn’t been all bad for AFV. In fact, it has helped the show in at least one major way: There are now simply more videos to choose from. After a few low years when submissions dropped to a trickle, these days the show is steadily getting about 2,000 clips a week. And in addition to direct submissions, producers also occasionally comb the web for breaking hits. The challenge, of course, is that by the time a great clip gets spotted by AFV, it may be too well-known. To deal with this, the producers have come up with their own YouTube barometer: If a video is starting to gain traction but has yet to hit 50,000 views, AFV will ask the uploader to take it off the web (or at least set it to private) and submit it to the show. Once it breaks the 50,000-view mark, however, Di Bona has little use for it.

To amateur videographers, such an offer presents a dilemma. Do you turn your clip over to the AFV vaults, where it could very well languish forever? Or do you set it loose on the web in hopes of selling a few T-shirts and maybe earning the honor of being razzed on Kimmel? For some, losing out on a possible six-figure prize is a risk worth taking. In 2008, a Florida real estate agent named David DeVore filmed his son, also named David, returning from a dental appointment. Still under anesthesia, the younger David let loose a string of woozy observations (“Is thish real life?”), resulting in “David After Dentist,” a 2-minute clip that DeVore posted on YouTube. DeVore also submitted it to AFV but balked at the terms. “I’m a big fan of that show,” DeVore says. “My kids still watch it. But once I heard ‘exclusive rights,’ I backed away.”

He has since licensed the clip for a TV ad and a line of toothbrushes, earning far more than the $100,000 prize the show offers. In fact, while AFV‘s producers note it’s unlikely they would have aired “David After Dentist” because it involved a minor under the influence of a drug, DeVore’s success, however rare, proves you don’t need AFV to score some fame and cash.

“I don’t think we heard the fart.”

In a mostly tidy conference room at AFV‘s production office, the show’s writers and producers are screening prospective clips for an upcoming episode. One of the videos, dubbed “Popeye Baby,” features a notably jug-eared infant playing in a tub. It’s cute, but as producer Nasraway has just pointed out, the video’s punch line doesn’t quite land.

Todd Thicke, another producer, rewinds the clip. “I don’t care about the fart so much,” he says. “I thought it was funny because he was funny-looking.”

llustration: Demetri Martin

“We need a combo,” Nasraway says. “He’s got to be doing something funny.” Ultimately, they compromise and decide that “Popeye Baby” can stay, but only if the volume of the fart is goosed a bit.

For the next hour, the team works its way through more than 100 clips. All have been preapproved by the show’s screeners, the woebegone souls who review submissions, looking for a few choice seconds. When they find something, they enter it in the show’s database, using descriptions so sober and succinct they read like police reports from the slowest precinct in the world:

CLIP # 41244: Cat asleep on TV, abruptly falls off.

CLIP # 630951: Parrot bites teen girl’s face.

CLIP # 350412: Baby puts cake down mom’s shirt.

A few of the videos being screened have been around for years, and they’re received by the writers with the same nodding familiarity one would greet a worn-in classic-rock song (the show does re-air clips, but not as often as you’d expect; its most popular video, featuring a group of giggling quadruplets, has appeared on only six episodes). By the end of the afternoon, they’ll have pruned out the lesser entries—the wipeouts that don’t quite biff hard enough or are marred by blurry cell phone pixels.

In recent years, as AFV has evolved to compete with the Internet, the show has dialed back the cutesiness—no more slide-whistle effects or animal voiceovers—and pumped up the volume, cramming in as many as 100 clips an episode. “It would take a week to find that many good clips on YouTube,” coproducer Mike Palleschi says, “whereas we can give them to you in an hour.” AFV used to be a waste of viewers’ time; now it helps them manage time better.

These days, most AFV videos are slotted into one of the show’s countless montage sequences. On the wall of the conference room hang several brightly colored note cards with words like itchy, zipline, sea turtles, and, most disturbingly, lick—all clips waiting to be slotted into one montage or another. For each episode, the writers decide on a dozen or so themes, cull as many appropriate clips as they can, and try to come up with a few glib one-liners for Bergeron.

In addition to fresh submissions, to build out a montage writers draw clips from the show’s substantial 22-year-old video collection, many of which have never been seen by the public. Housed on a server in the AFV office, it amounts to a darknet of dumb.

After the writers’ meeting, Nasraway lets me dig through this vault. Today there are exactly 103,894 digitized clips available—not a huge number, until you remember that Di Bona has exclusive rights to every single one. Each video is filed under one of 12 categories—adults, animals, babies, birthdays, boneheads, fall-downs, forbidden, kids, production videos, teens, sports, and weddings—and tagged with specific keywords like cats (4,291 entries) and snot (265).

I ask Nasraway how many of those 103,894 videos are still waiting to be aired. How many funny videos could possibly be left? Three thousand, maybe four?

She pulls up the results. As of today, there are 80,278 clips left—many of them submitted years ago, their owners having long ago signed away the rights. Some have undoubtedly wound up online anyway, but it’s a good bet that a lot were dropped in the mail and forgotten about altogether. In the digital age, where exclusivity is itself a rarity, a cache like this is immensely valuable. There are enough unaired clips to build dozens of seasons of AFV.

Of course, not all are winners. Nasraway cues up an unused video of a kid bashing away at a Santa Claus piñata. The action is slow, and the picture is a bit murky; it may be good enough for someone’s Facebook wall, but it’s far below the standards of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Then there are the 159 “forbidden” videos, clips even the most lax network censor wouldn’t allow, such as a masturbating walrus or a woman who throws up on a child after eating baby food. “Just torrents of vomit,” Nasraway says. “It’s fantastic.”

Though these clips won’t make it to air anytime soon—especially the ones involving self-pleasuring sea animals—the show holds on to them, and the more benign entries are periodically reevaluated, just in case somebody missed the joke the first time around. “We’ve found finalists that way,” Nasraway says. “Maybe the screener was having a bad day. Then someone else went back in and found gold.”

Back at the taping, the show has come down to six finalists, including a woman passing out on an amusement-park ride, a baby with an out-of-control toy stuck in his pants, and the kid with his thumb stuck in the toilet lid. In the end, the $100,000 prize goes to “Cookieface Race,” in which a mom and her two sons try to make cookies travel from their foreheads to their mouths without using their hands.

It’s a perfectly fine clip, and if the family members had thrown it on YouTube, it likely would have garnered a few hundred thousand views and maybe earned them a few hours’ worth of web fame. Instead, they opted to send it to AFV, winding up with a big check and a confetti-strewn celebration. And maybe that’s the biggest reason this show has lasted so long: As fun as it is to watch a bunch of stupidly random web clips, AFV proves that the far-off prizes we all desire—a great wad of cash, a few seconds of TV fame, and a happy ending—are still within reach. America, America—this is you.